The development blog of the Indie game, Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox.

Please note that all screen shots displayed in this blog are works in progress and in no way represent the appearance of the final game. Check out the main site here.

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Sunday, May 9, 2010

Technical details...

Lots of progress with development tonight, however it's all boring background technical stuff, so there's nothing to really show for it. Rest assured that the game will be a LOT better for the things I've been doing.

I've also set up the groundwork for something I've been procrastinating over for quite some time in the engine: player collision. Basically the code that stops you being able to walk through walls. It's a tricky nut to crack but I'm finally at that stage where it has to be done, so I spent a bit of time setting up a lot of the background tasks required to make collision work, but I still have yet to do the code for the collision itself. More on that soon.

We got the first round of concept work back from Ordinary Obscurity and it is AWESOME. You can also expect to see it turned into a set of high-res dungeon models soon. And with hi-res models comes the need for viewport culling (hiding the 3D models that aren't in the player's line of sight) otherwise people will need to have AMAZING computers to run the game.

In other - slightly similar - news, I've been toying around with some code to make model animations all play at the same speed, regardless of the computer it's playing on. Generally speaking when you write a 3D engine, animations will play slower of slower computers, and vice versa, and it's actually kinda tricky to normalize all of the animations based on the system clock accurately for all computers, so with luck I'll be able to sort that out.

Yeah, pretty much just grinding out all the boring background stuff that makes the game hold together lately. With luck I'll be able to show you all some really cool screenshots soon. Hopefully once I start work on the hi-res dungeon models created using the new concept art from Ordinary Obscurity.